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Nice Address, but Where Is It Really?

Too bad Neil Simon stopped with “Lost in Yonkers.” He might have had a fine time giving “Lost in Manhattan” a shot. The comedic potential is certainly there. (Actually, my tastes lean more to the dark humor of Martin McDonagh, but he already has his hands full with Spokane.)

What inspires these thoughts is a report from the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, about how easy it can be in his realm to lose one’s way.

Mr. Stringer’s troops fanned out along 13 busy corridors of Manhattan, checking out 1,837 locations. They found that nearly 40 percent of them — 729 places, to be exact — had no addresses posted out front. The stretch of Eighth Avenue between 42nd and 59th Streets was notably derelict, with a no-address rate of 58 percent.

You can see the possibilities for someone with Neil Simon sensibilities. There is, however, nothing funny about this, in Mr. Stringer’s view.

The failure to put up street numbers on buildings or storefronts, a violation of city regulations that risks a $25 fine, can flummox locals as well as visitors. “I’ve lived here all my life,” the borough president said, “and there are certain places where you can’t find where you’re going.” Worse yet, he said, the violators create a potential hazard. In an emergency, firefighters and other responders may lose precious time figuring out where they should be.

The absence of street numbers is definitely annoying, although when it comes to creating confusion, Manhattan is minor league compared with Tokyo of years ago. There, houses on a street were assigned numbers in the order in which they were built. So a house numbered 2 might have been way down the block from No. 1, whose immediate neighbor could have easily been No. 16.

For some people in Manhattan, missing addresses are not nearly as big a headache as addresses that are clearly marked but are totally incomprehensible.

These are known as vanity addresses. They are a perk offered to developers for a price — $11,000 is the going rate — to make their properties seem more highfalutin and thus worthy of soak-the-tenant rents. The practice is a cousin to the real estate industry’s love of new place names, like Hudson Heights for a riverfront stretch of Washington Heights, to make an area sound less proletarian and more fancy-schmancy.

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Guidelines issued by the borough president’s office say that a vanity address “should not create confusion as to a building’s location, in deference to both public safety and convenience.” This high-minded policy is sometimes honored only in the breach.

If you want to find 1325 Avenue of the Americas, don’t bother going to Avenue of the Americas. That building is near Seventh Avenue, with entrances on 53rd and 54th Streets.

The 237 Park Avenue Atrium is actually at 466 Lexington Avenue and cannot possibly be reached by way of Park Avenue. A new building called 11 Times Square is nearing completion at Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street. It does not by any reasonable definition sit on Times Square, even if it lies within the Times Square Alliance business improvement district.

PLENTY of other examples abound. But for a maddening arrangement it is hard to beat the Penn Plaza addresses that ring Pennsylvania Station and Madison Square Garden. They are worthy of old Tokyo: 1 Penn Plaza leads to No. 15, which leads to No. 11, then to No. 7, then to No. 5, and so on.

“I have never quite figured it out,” Mr. Stringer said. Who has?

The borough president’s guidelines also say that addresses are “designed to maintain a sequential order.” This rule is grossly violated by an apartment building at 62 West 62nd Street. A proper sequential order would require it to be west of 44 West 62nd. Instead, it is east of No. 44; the developers liked the symmetry of the two 62s, and the courts let them have their way.

That was years ago. Generally speaking, the borough president’s office is less willing these days than it once was to give in to a developer’s ego. In addition, many places now post their real addresses along with the vanity addresses, though in less prominent positions and in smaller letters.

Perhaps overweening vanity has run its course for the moment. Tower 2 planned for the World Trade Center site has an honest-to-goodness formal address: 200 Greenwich Street. If it ever gets built, maybe the owners will remember to put the address out front.

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on March 23, 2010, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Nice Address, But Where Is It Really?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe